You should use a flag when you're referring to a country or region, for example when you have an e-commerce website and are just distributing in certain areas. But languages do not have flags associated and then should not be used in language selectors.
Check that the example in the GH thread has Spanish as one of their choices and has the Spanish flag. Spanish is talked in a lot of countries including Spain, but also Spain has 4 different official languages in its own state territory. So, there exists es_ES, es_MX, es_PE but also es_ES and ca_ES. What flag should we paint in each case?
I've seen this mistake soo many times...
I accidently changed languages in my phone to Arabic on android. It uses no icons to display languages, when a language is chosen all the options changed to the localized Arabic names.
I think the only logical solution is to display the options in the language, eh Arabic in Arabic letters, English in English letters etc.
But icons would still be useful. But there isn't a universally accepted icon for any language.
And yes, do not include any icons whatsoever. Text only. A standard for visual depiction of languages is not going to come any time soon, and flags are completely unsuitable for the purpose.
For each language, show name of language in that language + name of language in currently selected language.
Languages are hard.
So just use the language code for languages?
there are far fewer format options than countries, so this is an exercise in frustration
(*en_SE.UTF-8 btw)
That said, this particular issue should not have been turned into a state-politics issue. The element in question seems to be a language selection rather than a country selection, so the very first argument ("TaiWan flag should not be placed along with other REAL country flags") is a bad one regardless of how you think of Taiwan's political status.
I also agree with another commenter that said the maintainer dealt with this really well. Kudos to them!
But filing tickets demanding to remove something from a CSS library because it "isn't a real country" definitely is a political statement. Which, for me, is always very unwelcome, but quite mundane at this point.
Not people focused on the purpose of the repo.
Languages are already quite political, but maps and all their borders and city names are much worse. Some borders are disputed and both sides have made the distribution of maps with the "wrong" borders illegal, the Catalans hate to see the Spanish names of their towns used in the Spanish version of the website, sometimes borders are moving fast and the inhabitants of newly founded countries usually feel really strong about the correct representation on every single map in the world, and even if you use maps without borders or labels at all, it could be illegal to plot some kind of harmless data on it, like wind speeds that have not been published by the country's authorities.
Stuff like this inevitably floods the inboxes of a lot of companies, so I'm not surprised at all to see it happen on GitHub.
It’s an entirely separate issue from the flag, but the developer technically should label the languages “Chinese (China)” and “Chinese (Taiwan)” in the dropdown instead, to better correspond to the flags.
Whilst I understand you didn't mean to start a political debate, you have made a political choice by using the Taiwan so it's unfair to blame others for "bringing politics into it" just because you don't have understanding on the subject.
> "No one can deny that it [Taiwan] owns a flag."
1 Billion Chinese people would like a word with you.
Or rather, how Ukraine's would feel, doesn't it make more sense that way around?
> You've made a political choice by using the Taiwan flag in the first place so don't blame others for "bringing politics into it" just because you don't have understanding on the subject.
There's a country called Taiwan, it has a flag, it's flag was put next to the name of the country. Where's the politics?
That's my point.
You think there is no politics between China and Taiwan?
Disagreement is not hate. I do not agree with the person who wants to get rid of the Taiwanese flag since as far as I'm concerned Taiwan is a country but I do not hate him for his request.
Please don't use the word hate for these purposes as all that does is downplay cases of real hate.
> TaiWan is not a country, is essentially a province of China. currently it's a district because of some history reasons. > So, TaiWan flag should not be placed along with other REAL country flags, It's a big misleading to website visitors.
This is not just a disagreement.
That was one of the many really terrible ideas that we've had. In the US we say "It's the Economy, Stupid" to represent the idea that, when the economy is doing well, people are happy with the government. And then we helped give China decades of incredible economic growth, but somehow expected that the result would be Chinese citizens being unhappy with their government?!
But... "Fuck off" would also have been very reasonable.
I guess in this case the contributors were Taiwanese and decide to use that flag.
